Munich Filmfest 2025
Opening weekend of Munich Filmfest 2025, Pride and 90s Super Show XXL at Königsplatz, and Videoheaven saving the weekend.
To steal the Reno, Nevada tagline formula: if Munich is the biggest little city in Germany, then the Munich Filmfest is the biggest little film festival in Europe.
The Filmfest this year began the same weekend as other giant events after a false start summer in Munich, which didn’t truly begin until mid-June. The city is finally alive again, vibrating in humidity and questionable air conditioning.
On Saturday, the first full day of the festival, one can glimpse on the streets of Maxvorstadt (one of Munich’s more bougie central hoods containing museums, two big universities, and gaggles of CSU douchebags) who’s going to which event: red lanyard badge holders to the Filmfest, glitter/rainbows/mesh tops to the Pride parade; Gen Xers to Königsplatz for “90s Super Show XXL”—“Europe's biggest 90s show”, featuring Billy Idol, 2 Unlimited, Haddaway, and who can forget Eiffel 65?—a place/time when Germans can remember the effusiveness of their recent re-unification (before the inequality set in) and before waves of refugees.
(This is my fourth time visiting the Munich Filmfest, so check out my film festival coverage of past festivals, including my first essay for the Munich Filmfest when they ghosted me for accreditation and I was very very salty the whole time. And please subscribe if you haven’t done so already!)
My first day started with a trio of not-for-me films ("Un Poeta", "Aïcha", and "Omaha"—the latter two much more so), then picked up steam the following noon with “Videoheaven”, Alex Ross Perry's newest documentary on the rise and fall of video stores.
Given the present-day, almost cult-like status of video stores (see: "Stranger Things"), I entered the screening critical of the nostalgia-fest to come from a director known for his cinema reverence on film podcast appearances, previous films, and his NYC Millennia aesthetics. Also, the Astor Club Kino we were sitting in iss lined will walls of bookcases from a recent renovation. My thoughts revolved around: will this film empty out the substance of the video store phenomenon in the same way these books will only exist to supplement the visuals a small cinema room? In short, this doc would be a grand jury trial on whether nostalgia is good, or bad.
In 172 minutes, none of which are wasted, Alex Ross Perry tells us the story of video stores from start (late 70s) to finish (late 00s), from good (independent stores) to bad (mega-chains). “Videoheaven” acts like a video essay with the credentials of an exacting film studies essay told through the depiction of video stores on screen. It's historizing the video store through the medium's artists themselves, following a now popular mode of film criticism that depictions inscribe the socio-cultural conditions of the object itself. In other words, the way video stores are depicted, whether as places of fear or middle-class normalcy according to a certain time/place, represents a snapshot of their existence at that time that de-emphasizes individual artistic intent in favor of the zeitgeist. And when magnified through 100+ clips from fifty years of media, this comes as close to (please pardon the pretension) "cinema as truth" as possible.
But "Videoheaven" doesn't draw its strength through this method of storytelling alone. Maya Hawke provides a beautiful narration from what had to be 50+ pages of dense text; the editing draws together an unimaginably complex web of connections from disparate sources that never ceases to stay on thematic track; and most importantly, it has a story arc and a thesis, aka ‘something to say’, which is missing from most sloppy documentaries today. It starts with Ethan Hawke's "to be or not to be" soliloquy from "Hamlet" (2000), contemplating the death of the video store as film culture icon; then it ends with the line, "they exist only in the past." Alex Ross Perry isn't interested in reviving the substance of a nostalgic signifier, that's impossible.
In my 1:5 films are good/bad film festival ratio, so far so good. I head over to the Beergarden Convention for a triumphantly free Helles while images of "Loser" and "Seinfeld" from “Videoheaven” swirl in the long-dormant academic film studies corners of my brain. It's 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), medium humidity, and the energy is low while happy hour is still thirty minutes away. Then it gets buzzy, the free mini-plates of olives and hummus and uninspired German Bread come out, the line for free drinks builds, and the smiles come out. Women are in summer dresses, men are in light colored button-downs, and everyone is sweaty as hell.
This is the first time I see the festival pop-off. Like the false start of the summer, so to the festival's energy. And like the false start of those first three films, "Videoheaven" was there to remind us why cinema rocks.
I go into the screening of "The Baltimorons" sun-stroked and mildly intoxicated, excited to see Jay Duplass's first feature in thirteen years. It starts funny and endearing, then became not-for-me halfway through as the genre shifted to awkward levels. In the Q&A afterwards, Duplass and actor-writer Michael Strassner are charming and having a good jet-lagged time, but it was brought down by the fact that audiences (at least here in Germany) don't know how to ask good questions. Whatever happened to the professional moderator? Too much mic democracy—I was going for de(mic)racy but that looks a bit weird.
The final film of the weekend, "Together", stars real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie playing a couple in a body horror romance. It was bizarre, I'm not into horror so I won't pass the Definite Review, but I think the marketing will only have the "starring real-lie couple playing a couple" with which to work.
Stay tuned for more updates from the festival!
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